Anti-government protesters in Mahalla, Egypt’s largest industrial city, have reportedly taken over the local city council and announced their autonomy from the state ruled by the Muslim Brotherhood.

­Protesters threw the head of their city council out of the building, announcing they “no longer belong to the Ikhwani state,” the Daily News Egypt reports.

Workers have attempted to create a “revolutionary council” and rule the industrial city, report suggests. The head of the Mahalla City Council, Ismail Fathy, however, denied the claims.

“The demonstrations, which attracted around 3,000 people, were peaceful,” he told satellite TV channel CBC in a phone interview. “Nothing of this sort happened.”

Mokhtar El-Ashri, the senior leader of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party, also denied reports of Mahalla’s announcement to secede.

“I was in Mahalla all day, I did not see any of this happening,” he told CBC.

El-Mahalla el-Kubra, a city north of Cairo home to 450,000, was dubbed the cradle of the Egyptian revolution. The opposition April 6 movement was formed there in 2009, and the first major anti-government protests also took place there.

Meanwhile, unconfirmed reports circulating on Twitter suggest that protesters in four more Egyptian cities – Alexandria, Kafr Sheikh, Sharqaya and Sohag – have declared independence, announcing that President Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood have lost the legitimacy to rule following the deadly clashes in Cairo that left at least seven people killed and hundreds injured.

The Egypt Independent confirmed clashes between opponents and supporters of President Morsi in Alexandria on Friday evening, adding that demonstrators had broken into the city’s local council building.

Meanwhile in Tanta, Egypt’s fifth-largest city, a crowd of anti-government protesters reportedly torched the Freedom and Justice Party’s local headquarters.

Tens of thousands of anti-Mohamed Morsi protesters gather in front of the presidential palace on December 7, 2012 in Cairo (AFP Photo / Patrick Baz)

Hoda Osman, president of the Arab and Middle Eastern Journalist Association, believes that as public discontent in the streets grows, President Morsi is repeating his predecessor’s mistakes.

“There are lots of feelings against the Muslim Brotherhood by a lot of Egyptians, especially because of the role they played right after the revolution,” she explained. “A lot of people saw that they were close to the army and the army was responsible for a lot of the problems that we were seeing.”

Egyptians are seeing another dictator in the making – “they are seeing another Mubarak,” Osman said.

A picture to be sent to the White House, the State Department, the Washington Think Tanks and the Ivy League Middle East Studies programs: Millions in Cairo are demonstrating against the Islamist regime in Egypt. Bloggers, Facebook citizens…

and free media must post this picture as evidence that the people of Egypt are rejecting the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafists. The US Congress must suspend Financial Aid to the Egyptian regime until Morsi resigns.

That’s all—that’s the “proof” that this story is a “hoax”: Daily News Egypt (DNE) “has learned” that someone was “impersonating” the Bahraini cleric, whom I quoted. Unlike my article, DNE offers no evidence, no links, no proof to back its story: “Just believe us—you’ll feel better,” seems to be the message.

Some questions: If, as DNE suggests, this was a hoax to scare people over the rising influence of Egypt’s Islamists, why did the hoax perpetrators choose a cleric from Bahrain, a small, foreign nation—why not parody an Egyptian cleric, which obviously would’ve made for a much more effective “hoax”?

More importantly, why does DNE not address the other sources I had cited—including Egypt’s very own Salafi party, which is on record calling for the elimination of Egypt’s pyramids? Even Elaph, “one of the most influential websites in the Arab world,” documents that both the Bahraini cleric and Egypt’s Salafis are calling for the Pyramids’ destruction.

Needless to say, DNE’s hoax charge was quickly disseminated by others, who added their own “logic.” For example, after quoting DNE as evidence, one Kate Durham, writing in Egypt Today focuses on portraying me as having an “agenda” (which, of course, I do: safeguarding the Pyramids).

Really? This almost suggests that the Arabian marauders, who invaded Egypt in the 7th century, pillaging and destroying, were “respectful” of the “cultural significance” of the Pyramids—perhaps designating them as “tourist attractions”? What about 8th century Caliph Ma’mun, who—as this comprehensive English-language fatwa dedicated to explaining the Islamic obligation of destroying pagan monuments, including the Pyramids, puts it—“wanted to destroy the Pyramids in Egypt and he gathered workers but he could not do it”?

What about 12th century Bin Yusif, Saladin’s son and ruler of Egypt? He attempted to destroy the Pyramids, and had an army of laborers work day and night to dismantle Menkaure’s Pyramid, only to quit after eight months, realizing the futility of the task, though his vandals did manage to leave a large vertical gash in the Pyramid’s north face (see here). What about Egypt’s Mamlukes who, with the advent of gun powder, used the “pagan” Sphinx for target practice, effacing its nose?

After citing the DNE report, Huffington Post’s Llewelyn Morgan offers his assurances: “Let’s be crystal-clear about this right here. The answer to the question in my title [“Are the Pyramids Next?”] is a mile-high, neon ‘NO’. The pyramids of Giza are under no threat whatsoever, and neither is any of the rest of Egypt’s glorious archaeological record.”

He then portrays me as “scaremongering” and “offer[ing] a deeply misleading account of what has been happening in Timbuktu,” because I had written, “Currently, in what the International Criminal Court is describing as a possible ‘war crime,’ Islamic fanatics are destroying the ancient heritage of the city of Timbuktu in Mali—all to Islam’s triumphant war cry, ‘Allahu Akbar!’” Morgan explains:

To read that that you’d think that the only Muslims involved in events at Timbuktu were the ones doing the vandalism. But of course it was Islamic buildings that they were attacking. Ansar al-Din, the al-Qaeda-affiliated zealots in northern Mali, consider the traditional Sufi practices of Timbuktu to be heretical.

This is strange logic, indeed. Because the Salafis of Mali consider Sufi buildings insufficiently Islamic—as all Salafis, Wahhabis, and “radicals” do—according to Morgan, that is proof positive that the Pyramids, which are purely pagan, are “under no threat whatsoever” from Egypt’s Salafis.

If Morgan’s point is that, by destroying Sufi Muslim shrines, the “al-Qaeda-affiliated zealots” are not practicing “true Islam”—that’s still neither here nor there. All Salafis—whether in Mali or in Egypt, whether “al-Qaeda affiliated” or not—reject Sufism as a heresy and pagan Pyramids as worse; and in Egypt, the Salafis are now out of the prisons and sitting in Parliament.

All of these apologists are unaware that the Koran portrays pre-Islamic Egypt’s Pharaoh as the quintessential infidel, with the result that the Pyramids, the handiwork of Pharaoh, have always been seen by the pious as an affront to the total victory of Islam in Egypt—hence why any number of Muslim leaders through the centuries tried to lay low those defiant symbols of Egypt’s pre-Islamic past; hence why such calls are again become vocal.

Indeed, here’s the latest bit of evidence: just published in El-Balad, on July 17, “Egypt’s Justice and Development for Human Rights warned against the ongoing incitements from a large number of men of the Islamic religion to destroy the Pyramids and other Pharaonic antiquities, deeming them pagan symbols of pre-Islamic Egypt…. these calls have greatly increased after the victory of the Muslim Brotherhood candidate, Dr. Muhammad Morsi.”

These calls are not a joke—nor a “hoax”: the same mentality that sought to destroy the Pyramids in the past, is the same mentality that is gaining mastery over Egypt in the present—with the exception that, if destroying the Pyramids was an impossible task then, it is realizable now, a wonderful feather in the turban of any aspiring “champion of Islam”—a feat that none of the greatest caliphs and sultans could accomplish, try as they might.